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SPEECH OF CHARLES DICKENS 

DELIVERED AT 

GORE HOUSE, KENSINGTON 
MAY 10, 1851 




CopiTight]*]^ 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



^ '^^'f- 



SPEECH 



OF 



CHARLES DICKENS 



DELIVERED AT GORE HOUSE, KENSINGTON. MAY 10. 1851 



PRINTED FROM THE ORIGINAL 
AUTOGRAPH MANUSCRIPT 



EXCLUSIVELY FOR MEMBERS OF 

THE BIBLIOPHILE SOCIETY 
BOSTON, MDCDIX 



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^ 



Copyrighted 1909, by 

THE BIBWOPHILE SOCIETY 

All Rights Reserved 



THE TORCH PRESS 
CEDAR RAPIDS, IOWA 



©GIA'^51893 



The original MS. of the '^ Dickens 
Speech" is owned by one of our members, 
Mr. Edmund D. Brooks, of Minneapolis. 
He has kindly prepared an introductory 
note and loaned the MS. to The Bibliophile 
Society to be printed for the members. The 
cost of issuing this pamphlet has been 
charged into general expense, and no direct 
charge is made to members therefor. 

The Council 



FOREWOED 

The text of tMs Speecli, as printed in the 
National Edition of Dickens's Works, pub- 
lished by Chapman and Hall, vol. 38, page 
390, contains about eleven hundred words, 
while the original manuscript, now printed 
in full for the first time, contains nearly two 
thousand words. 

Aside from the new matter, the MS. 
differs from the printed form in many essen- 
tial details, suggesting the conclusion that 
the After-dinner Speech of Dickens in pro- 
posing the toast ''Lord Ashley and the 
Board of Health" was originally written 
out with much care, spoken extempore, and 
the speech as printed was taken from the 
reporter's account with no reference to the 
MS., which was probably not then available 
for printing. 

Throughout the printed speech the third 
person is used, as, ''Of what avail is it to 
send missionaries to the miserable man con- 
demned to work in a foetid court, with every 
sense bestowed upon him for his health and 
happiness turned into a torment, with every 
month of his life adding to the heap of evil 
under which he is condemned to exist ?'^ 

[5] 



The MS. is in the first person, as follows : 
''What avails it to send a Missionary to me, 
a miserable man or woman living In a foetid 
court where every sense bestowed upon me 
for my delight becomes a torment, and every 
minute of my life is a new mire added to the 
heap under which I lie degraded?" 

The MS. also contains many courteous 
phrases and humorous allusions, character- 
istic of the great novelist, which are entirely 
omitted in the printed version. And the 
new material furnished gives an interesting 
glimpse of the sanitary struggles with which 
modern London has wrestled. 

As is well known, Dickens felt a keen 
interest in any reform likely to benefit the 
condition of the poor, and was consequently 
the ardent champion of the various plans 
for the betterment of the sanitation of Lon- 
don, which began about 1840, and continued 
during his lifetime. 

The MS., consisting of fourteen closely 
written 8vo pages entirely in the handwrit- 
ing of Dickens, is superbly bound, by San- 
gorski and Sutcliffe, of London, in full dark 
green crushed levant, gold-tooled sides, 
leather joints, and silk fiy-leaves. 

Edmund D. Brooks 

[6] 



A SPEECH DELIVERED AT GORE 

HOUSE, KENSINGTON, 

MAY 10, 1851 

BY CHARLES DICKENS 

My Lord and Gentlemen: — 

I am placed in that peculiarly advan- 
tageous position for speaking, that I must 
either turn from the chairman or from the 
company. But, as the company includes 
that best and brightest part of all company, 
whose presence (I presume) we are sup- 
posed not to recognize on these occasions as 
we never address them — and, as I have 
abundant experience of the innate courtesy 
and politeness of my noble friend — I shall 
take the course which I am sure will be most 
agreeable to him, and turn to this assembly 
in general. Indeed, gentlemen, I have but 
a few words to say, either on the needfulness 
of Sanitary Reform, or on the consequent 
usefulness of the Metropolitan Sanitary 
Association. 

[7] 



That no one can estimate the amount of 
mischief which is grown in dirt ; that no one 
can say, here it stops, or there it stops, either 
in its physical or its moral results, when 
both begin in the cradle and are not at rest 
in the obscene grave, is now as certain as it 
is that the air from Gin Lane will be carried, 
when the wind is Easterly, into May Fair, 
and that if you once have a vigorous pesti- 
lence raging furiously in Saint Giles's, no 
mortal list of Lady Patronesses can keep it 
out of Almack's. 

Twelve or fifteen years ago, some of the 
first valuable reports of Mr. Chadwick and 
of Dr. Southwood Smith, strengthening and 
much enlarging my previous imperfect 
knowledge of this truth, made me, in my 
sphere, earnest in the Sanitary Cause. And 
I can honestly declare tonight that all the 
use I have since made of my eyes or nose, 
that all the information I have since been 
able to acquire through any of my senses, 
has strengthened me in the conviction that 
Searching Sanitary Reform must precede 
all other social remedies, and that even Edu- 
cation and Religion can do nothing where 
they are most needed, until the way is paved 
for their ministration by Cleanliness and 

[8] 



Decency. Am I singular in this opinion? 
You will remember the speech made this 
night by the Right Reverend Prelate, which 
no true Sanitary Reformer can have heard 
without emotion. What avails it to send a 
Missionary to me, a miserable man or woman 
living in a foetid Court where every sense 
bestowed upon me for my delight becomes a 
torment, and every minute of my life is new 
mire added to the heap under which I lie 
degraded? To what natural feeKng within 
me is he to address himself ? What ancient 
chord within me can he hope to touch? Is 
it my remembrance of my children? Is it 
a remembrance of distortion and decay, 
scrofula and fever? Would he address 
himself to my hopes of immortality? I 
am so surrounded by material filth that my 
Soul can not rise to the contemplation of an 
immaterial existence! Or, if I be a miser- 
able child, born and nurtured in the same 
wretched place, and tempted, in these better 
times, to the Ragged School, what can the 
few hours' teaching that I get there do for 
me, against the noxious, constant, ever-re- 
newed lesson of my whole existence? But 
give me my first glimpse of Heaven through 
a little of its light and air — give me water 

[9] 



— help me to be clean — lighten this heavy 
atmosphere in which my spirit droops and I 
become the indifferent and callous creature 
that you see me — gently and kindly take 
the body of my dead relation out of the 
small room where I grow to be so familiar 
with the awful change that even its sanctity 
is lost to me — and, Teacher, then I'll hear, 
you know how willingly, of Him whose 
thoughts were so much with the Poor, and 
who had compassion for all human sorrow I 
I am now, gentlemen, to propose to you 
as a toast a public Body without whose effi- 
cient aid this preparation so much to be 
desired, for Christianity at home, cannot be 
effected ; and by whom, if we earnestly desire 
such preparation, we must stand, giving 
them all the support it is in our power to 
render. I mean, the Board of Health. We 
have a transparent instance very near at 
hand of the mysterious arrangement that no 
great thing can possibly be done without a 
certain amount of nonsense being talked 
about it in the way of objection. Much as 
our respected friend the Ex-unprotected 
Female was confounded, at that family 
dinner party where we last heard of her by 
some alarming conversation respecting the 

[10] 



sparrows in Mr. Paxton's gutters, and the 
casks of gunpowder sent to the Great Expos- 
ition under the semblance of coffee, so, I 
dare say, it has been the fortune of most of 
us to hear the Board of Health discussed in 
various congenial circles. I have never been 
able to make out distinctly more than two 
objections to it: the first is expressed in a 
long word which I seem to remember to have 
heard pronounced with a sort of violent 
relish on two or three previous occasions — 
Centralization, 

Now, gentlemen, in the year before last, 
in the time of the cholera, you had an excel- 
lent opportunity of judging between this 
Centralization on the one hand, and what I 
may be permitted to call Vestrylization on 
the other. You may recollect the Reports 
of the Board of Health on the subject of 
cholera, and you may recollect the Reports 
of the discussions on the same subject at 
some vestry meetings. I have the honor — 
of which I am very sensible — to be one of 
the constituent body of the amazing Vestry 
of Marylebone ; and if you chance to remem- 
ber (as you very likely do) what the Board 
of Health did in Glasgow and other places, 
and what my vestry said, you will probably 

[11] 



agree with me tliat between tMs so-called 
Centralization, and this Vestrylization, the 
former is by far the best thing to stand by 
in an emergency. My vestry even took the 
high ground of denying the existence of 
cholera in an unusual degree. And although 
that denial had no greater effect upon the 
disease than my vestry's denial of the exist- 
ence of Jacob's Island had upon the Earth 
about Bermondsey, the circumstance may be 
suggestive to you in considering what 
Vestrylization is, when a few noisy little 
landlords interested in the maintenance of 
abuses, struggle to the foremost ranks ; and 
what the so-called Centralization is when it 
is a combination of active business habits, 
sound medical knowledge, and a zealous 
sympathy with the sufferings of the people. 
But, gentlemen, there is, as I have said, 
another objection to the Board of Health. 
It is conveyed in the shorter and less alarm- 
ing word — delay. Now, I need not suggest 
to you that it would surely be unreasonable 
to object to a first-rate chronometer, that it 
wouldn't go — when its owner wouldn't 
wind it up. Yet I cannot help thinking, I 
must plainly avow, that the Board of Health 
is in the parallel position of being excellently 

[12] 



adapted for going, and being very willing 
and anxious to go, but not being able to go, 
because its lawful master has fallen into a 
gentle slumber, and forgotten to set it a-go- 
ing. As a component particle of this asso- 
ciation which my Noble friend in the chair 
considers useful as a gentle stimulus to gov- 
ernments, I must take leave to say that I do 
not, and can not, consider the Board of 
Health responsible for delay in sanitary 
reforms. Lord Robert Grosvenor referred 
just now to Lord Castlereagh's favorite 
adage that you must never hallo until you 
are out of the Wood. It occurred to me that 
with a very slight addition that would be 
an excellent adage for all Sanitary Reform- 
ers : to-wit, that you must never hallo until 
you are out of the Woods — and Forests. 

If I may venture to make the remark 
under the presiding of my Noble friend, 
whom we were all so glad to see, and would 
all have been so happy to retain in those 
leafy regions, I would say that since the 
remote period when "the noble savage" ran 
wild there, some other Nobles —not savages 
by any means, but gentlemen of high accom- 
plishments and worth — have gone a little 
wild in the same districts and wandered 

[13] 



rather more languidly out of the direct path 
than is quite good for the public. You will 
of course understand that in saying this, I 
merely express my own individual misgiv- 
ings, but I will tell you why I entertain 
them. Considering the Report of the Board 
of Health on Intramural Interments to be 
one of the most remarkable social documents 
ever issued under any Government, and an 
honor to the country and the time, I cannot 
but believe that the Board of Health would 
have advanced a little quicker in the carry- 
ing out of the measure founded upon it 
but for some stoppage in the way above 
them which we don't clearly see. Re- 
membering the vigor and perspicuity with 
which they have indicated to us the 
chief Sanitary evils it is essential to 
remove, I cannot hold them responsible 
for the prolonged existence of those evils. 
As with omission, so with commission. 
Remembering how clearly they shewed 
us the advantages of a continuous sup- 
ply of soft water, and how they pointed 
out to us an abundant source of supply, 
I cannot cast upon them the blame of a 
measure which gives us only hard water. 
Remembering how they dwelt upon the 

[14] 



necessity of a combination of water-works, 
I cannot charge them with the injury of 
perpetuated separation. Remembering how 
they demonstrated to us that disease must 
lurk in houses founded over cesspools or 
built upon foundations saturated with cess- 
pool matter, I cannot hold them responsible 
for the maintenance of a system of drainage 
which does not remove these ills. And 
therefore, gentlemen, both for the good they 
have done, and for the good they may be 
fairly assumed to have had the will to do, 
but not the power, I commend the Board of 
Health to you as especially deserving and 
requiring the sympathy, the encouragement, 
and the support of the Metropolitan Sani- 
tary Association. 

I shall beg, in conclusion, to couple with 
the toast the name of a Noble Lord, one of 
its members, whose Earnestness in all good 
works no man can doubt, and who always 
has the courage steadily to face the worst 
and commonest of all cants; that is to say, 
the cant about the cant of philanthropy and 
benevolence. I propose to you. Lord Ash- 
ley and the Board of Health. 



[15] 



The following is printed from the origi- 
nal MS., in the handwriting of Dickens, to 
which is appended a note signed hy Mark 
Lemon, the editor of *' Punch'' at that time. 
The MS. is now in the collection of Mr. 
Bixby: 

DREADFUL HARDSHIPS 

Endured by the Shipwrecked Crew of the 
London Chief for Want of Water 

In the deplorable condition cast away 
upon that desolate & frightful region called 
the Suburbs, the aspect of which might well 
appal the stoutest heart, our sufferings for 
want of water are scarcely to be imagined. 
Cleanliness, either in our persons or our huts 
or clothing, was totally impossible. All the 
water, if it may be called such, that we had 
was an intermittent and irregular leakage 
of liquid filth (into a small foul butt) tainted 
with every description of poisonous and 
putrescent matter, swarming with marine 
monsters, loathsome to the sight, odious to 
the taste, offensive to the smell. To aggra- 
vate our sufferings, a savage of a hostile 
tribe made his appearance among us regu- 

[16] 



larly once a quarter, derided our complaints 
and cruelly tomahawked some of our mis- 
erable companions. The name of the wretch 
was Waw Taw-Rate Col Lee Taw. How 
often did our thoughts revert to our dear 
civilized land and its freedom from such 
intolerable evils. — Journal of the surviving 
sufferers. 

(The only contribution of Charles Dick- 
ens to Punch, 

M. Lemoit.) 



[17] 



HOY 29 19<^ 



NOV ?JO I9i 



HBRARY OF CONGRESS 




